Pregnancy on the cheap: what it’s cost so far

People often ask me if I’ve been having any cravings – and the answer is always no!

Aversions, on the other hand…

I miss enjoying food; nothing ever sounds appealing 99% of the time but one has to eat nonetheless. These days I’m eating to live vs living to eat, and that’s so not me.

Cravings aren’t costing me anything, but lemonade’s now a staple on the shopping list every week. It might be a placebo but quite frankly when the delightful pre-bed upset.indigestion sets in (usually peaks between 8-10pm) I don’t care.

Fortunately, healthcare is mostly free here and my antenatal costs have been minimal. A few bucks here and there for prescriptions, and $50 a pop for scans (beyond the first free dating scan) and this sixteen week ultrasound service that was done very quick and for a very affordable price.

I have health insurance through work, however the (small) obstetrics allowance only kicks in after a year – so would only cover costs in about the last month of pregnancy and beyond. As far as I can tell there should be no charges associated with labour/birth, apart from perhaps the fee they charge for partners to stay overnight with you at Birthcare.

So far, I’m still fitting into my current bras (this was perfect timing actually, as this lot were all about to hit the end of their life, having stretched out over the past couple of years) and still squeezing into my pants with the help of a handy $20 extender though possibly not for much longer. So far I’ve spent about $25 on new (thrifted) clothing – two pairs of stretchy pants that I live in when I’m at home (surely now down to about 0.01 cents cost per wear) and a flowy skirt with stretchy waistband.

In terms of baby stuff, we’re yet to actually begin shopping, the only thing that we have gotten is the best car seat stroller. I’m pretty set on avoiding mindless browsing and only buying the essentials, especially to start off with.

We definitely seem to be in line for some hand me downs, and I’d like to buy secondhand stuff where possible and safe. From what I can tell, lots of baby stuff just doesn’t get used for long and winds up getting sold online for much less, lightly used. Savings aside, think of all the wastefulness! I’d so much prefer to reuse than to contribute to unnecessary waste. And yes, I’m thinking about doing some cloth diapering too, but we’ll see how we go…

We got most of our baby stuff second-hand : pram, bassinet, cot, clothes, etc. eBay was great – we picked up our cot/change table set for $120 when it normally goes for about $1500. The only thing we bought new (and you should always buy new…) is the car seat.

The biggest saving by far was the fact that I exclusively breastfed (and still do even after introducing solids) and that the baby never went on a bottle. We saved money on formula, breast pumps, bottles, etc. Of course that assumes that people are able to produce enough milk, have long enough maternity leave that they can be at home feeding, etc etc.

Oh, and we never tried cloth diapering but I’m glad we didn’t – I’m already doing a load of laundry every two days now, compared to doing it once a week when it was just the two of us. The washer and dryer are almost running constantly these days in winter with the absence of sun to dry clothes, so factor electricity and water running costs into cloth diapering (especially in a climate like NZ).

Honestly for me cloth would be about reducing waste rather than $$$. I’m also wanting to steel myself just in case Spud is a mini me and can’t handle disposables (though I would hope diapers have improved a lot in the past 30 years for sensitive skin etc)

T is convinced we need to buy a dryer before baby comes (which I think we will, regardless of what we do re diapering)

Do you have space for a dryer? We didn’t cloth diaper because we were in a severe drought during zir first years and I judged not wasting water to be the lesser of waste evils.

We got tons of clothing hand me downs but it was nice to discover that it’s true, in the first several months you don’t need MUCH. The time for solids crept up on us really fast so at around six months we bought some kid utensils because no one handed down spoons and bowls but we only used 2 of the 4 pack and gifted the remainder to young friends with their new one.

Depending on their growth pattern, they really can grow in and out of clothes super fast. One friend’s kids grows super slow and is still in clothing for half their age, JB grew super fast and was in clothes sizes a year ahead. Also if it’s the same as here in the US, don’t exclusively rely on the tagged sizes, physically compare the clothes from each size range to see if they’re really a match. We some 6 month clothing that was more like 3 month, and some 3 month that was more like 12 month. So weird.

Yep we got space, I am just super resistant to the idea although I admit it would be handy (I think we’ve lived in 2 places where we had a dryer and it definitely helped a lot in winter). There have been a couple instances recently where we’ve lugged our wet loads down to the laundromat to use their dryers because of the nonstop rain…

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